Read Online The Rope: An Anna Pigeon Novel by Nevada Barr - Free Book Online

where she stood, smooth vertical walls rising for fifteen feet or so, then a steep slope from that to the eye.
    Twenty or two hundred, there was no way to climb out.
    “I screwed up,” Anna croaked, her throat raw and dry from shouting. Her head was aching again and her arm throbbing. “I hoped.”
    Getting into the solution hole would be easy. A strong person could easily climb down a twenty-foot rope. All he’d have to do was tie it to a big rock and drop it into the throat of the jar. When he left, he could just pull it up after him, no muss no fuss. Unless he drove or walked in from the miles of bleak and rocky desert she’d seen to the north, he’d have to climb up from the lake. That would be hard, harder than the short hop out of this hole. The monster had to be strong.
    Strong enough to carry her down into the hole? Maybe not. Her shoulder and head suggested he’d just tossed her over the lip to survive the fall or not.
    That was annoying. He wasn’t even sure she was a high enough grade of garbage to be monster meat.
    “Bite me, you prick!” she yelled at the eye. “I hope you choke to death on my bones.”
    He would be strong. Strong and young. Movies insisted serial killers were twenty to thirty years old. Anna hoped they were right and he was young; it limited the number of dead people with whom she might be sharing space.
    Though the lake was only a small part of Glen Canyon Recreation Area, nobody much hiked. There were a couple of trails used by backpackers, one down from the Navajo Reservation to Rainbow Bridge and another somewhere uplake. A trail led into Bullfrog, but it was long and came from nowhere to dead-end at the lake’s edge.
    People didn’t hike along the shoreline. Lake Powell didn’t have shores, not like a real lake. Powell lived in canyon bottoms, cliffs rising vertically two hundred, six hundred, as much as a thousand feet in some places. From what she’d seen of the plateau, there weren’t any roads.
    Other than on the water, or the few small beaches carved out from the sandstone, there wasn’t anywhere to be. Anything farther from the lake than a man could throw a beer can was dry rock and hot dirt, wilderness.
    Half a mile as the crow flies from this burial pit, boaters were catching fish, children were splashing in the shallows, and girls in bikinis were flirting with boys in cutoffs. A half mile and a half million light-years.
    At least that’s what it felt like to anybody but lunatics and coyotes, Anna thought sourly. She would not screw up again. Like praying to a nonexistent god, it was demoralizing to hope for help when none was coming.
    No, Anna wouldn’t hope.
    Turning, she studied her jar looking for anything new, anything she hadn’t noticed before—besides the nest of human hair under the sand. Silent walls swirled upward; smooth, beautiful in their way—a perfect palette for an artist.
    A perfect lair for a monster; utter privacy within commuting distance of home.
    Where was a monster when he was at home?
    Houseboats, even those moored in the marinas year-round, were allowed only two weeks on the water. It kept homesteaders from living on the lake full-time. Was the monster a boater who used his two weeks a year to pursue his hobby?
    That would work, Anna thought. That would be ideal. Spend two weeks on a houseboat—time enough for a bit of sport—kick sand over the remains, then go home to Oregon or New Hampshire or North Dakota, tanned and rested, plenty of holiday memories to enjoy over the winter, show one’s pals slides of the vacation.
    Anna swayed, her mind wanting to shut her down in a faint. The possibility that a picture of her misery might live on after she had been murdered to pleasure her killer over and over again was unbearable, worse somehow than death, torture, or rape. To be used after one was dead shouldn’t matter. Dead was dead, gone, beyond all pain.
    Except it wasn’t, not when one was alive to think about it.
    “No pictures,”